was taking hold. so he straddles two world's. >> host: how long were you in kenya and what did you see over there? what was it like to be there? >> guest: it was one of the great experiences of my life. it was so vivid. every day was unforgettable. we were there for about two weeks. it felt like a year. in a wonderful sense -- >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. the future state of energy issues by maggie koerth-baker on booktv. the of the reports there's no one answer to the problem of energy infrastructure and the more energy efficient world will not be a utopia but will be better than if no action is taken. it is about half an hour. [applause] >> thank you for coming out

here. i wanted to start this evening by talking a bit about a name you of not heard of before. h j rodgers. he is not very well-known but turns out he is one of the major forces in the history of electricity for some good reasons. h j rodgers in 1882 was one of the richest people in appleton, wisconsin. he owned a paper mill and was building a mansion on the hill. the next summer he made a fateful decision. he went on a fishing trip with a salesman from the edison electric lighting co.. at the time he had never seen an electric light bulb. bagasse sliding utility so electricity was an up and coming competitor for him but he came back from that fishing trip the proud owner of the rights to license and use edison technology in appleton and it was the beginning of the end for him as a successful businessman.

i like this story a lot. it goes against the narrative most of us learned in junior high. and everything comes together perfectly like electricity is this killer apps that solves the problem. it is a lot messier than that and the incandescent light bulb wasn't invented in 1879. was invented in 1804 by humphry davy who became the first person to run an electric current through a filament of wire and heating get up to the point that it began to produce light. he is better knows that better known as a chemist for potassium and sodium also invented the incandescent light and between humphrey davy and thomas it is and you have 80 years of different inventors tinkering around with this technology that was never quite ready for prime

time. even by the time h j rodgers came along in 1882 electricity wasn't sure thing. i think it is important to know because we are in the middle of these energy crises. we have climate change bearing down on us and limited amounts of fossil fuels and infrastructure that hasn't been updated in 30 years and all those things will require technology to solve our problems. at the same time we like to tell ourselves stories about technology that don't match up with reality. we like to talk about times where one guy had won it and it changed the world. that is really not what success normally looks like. if that is all we know we are doing ourselves a great disservice. if you don't understand that the electric grid we have today isn't a perfect thing, that it is not an ideal system and it has a lot of flaws that damage -- put at risk even beyond renewable generation you are not going to understand what our energy problems are and you won't understand what solutions

actually are either and that is one of the reasons i wrote my book "before the lights go out". i want to tell stories that help people understand how this technology we base our lives around works and how it will be affecting what we can or can't do about energy over the next 30 or 40 years. to tell that story i have to start in the state of wisconsin. in 1882 thomas edison was putting together the first centralized electric grid in the world in new york city. at the same time h j rodgers was working on his electric grid in appleton wisconsin and came close to beating edison to the punch. edison opened his grid in august of 1882 and two week later in september h rogers agreed came on line. was the second centralized grid in the world and the first hydroelectric power plant in the world. more importantly appleton was the first place somebody other than thomas edison without edison's team of geniuses

working around him tried to take this technology and apply it in the real world and failed miserably. when you understand why h j rodgers failed you will have a better understanding of how our grid works today and why there are some problems with it. a rogers -- h j rodgers's first problem was a technical problem. he had no idea what he was doing with the technology he purchased. there were no such thing as electric line men in 1882 or even electrical engineers. that was a dog thomas edison's staff was inventing as they went along in new york city and none of them had come west, he bought this technology but hadn't paid anybody to do it. it is harder to manage than he thought. the electric grid is like a river a water park. it isn't just one wire that

connects you to a power plant. it is a circus of wires that connect power plants to consumers and back around to the power plant again and you have to have had complete loop or you will get blackouts. likewise the grid has to operate in specific parameters. the electricity that flows along it has to live at a constant speed which is analogous to what engineers call frequency and it has to move that a constant depth analogous to what engineers call voltage. how do you maintain that constant speed and constant death is by maintaining an almost perfect balance between electric supply and electric demand. if it is off by a fraction of 1% you get blackouts. h j rodgers did not know this and he made some mistakes because of that. i told you he owned a paper mill. this paper mill was powered by a water wheel. he thought he could save some money by having the same waterwheel that powered his paper mills also power his

electric generator. the problem with this is the paper mill have a lot of demand for its services. the electric generator had exactly one customer which was h j rodgers himself. on days the paper mill was running at full capacity that generator was producing more electricity than the little grid needed and throughout his mansion electric light bulbs would burn out and every one of them cost $36 so that quickly became an expensive mistake. even if h j rodgers had been technically competent and there were people who were technically competent to set up these grid there's a good chance he still would have failed and that is because of a business problem. in 1882 there was exactly one thing you could do with electricity. that was like a light bulb. but you couldn't make enough money from lighting light bulbs to recoup costs of building the

infrastructure necessary to light that light bulb. this is a huge problem. until the nineteenth century very few american businessmen had any experience dealing with businesses that require you to build this massive expensive infrastructure before you could even get started. was affecting a lot of industries at the time. not just electricity but -- in all those industries what you saw were companies failing over and over. h j rodgers went bankrupt. the people who bought the electricity also went bankrupt. so did the people who bought the electric utility from them. was not until the 1920s that anybody was able to make running an electric utility a profitable business and even then was only because electric utility set out to create their own demands. they sat out with a concerted effort to invent things people could use electricity for and along the way they created the electric toaster oven and

invented the electric curling iron and lots of different things to do with electric motors. some of you have seen history books where you can see very small towns having these great big networks of electric streetcars. a lot of those were owned by utility companies trying to find something for people to do with electricity during the day. that worked to make electricity a profitable business but it only worked in cities. it only works in places where you could build one infrastructure and serve a lot of people at the same time. it didn't working real communities. for many years rural america was not electrified. they did not have the same modernity as the rest of the country. it wasn't until the 1930s-1950s one the federal government stepped in and started spreading the costs of building infrastructure over the country that you were able to get everybody up to the same speed on a technological basis. i think there are a few important things we need to

learn about the history of electricity. the first thing is the electric grid we have right now evolved. it wasn't designed. also evolved in the hands of people with no idea what they were doing. it shows still today. we don't have storage on the electric grid. that is a big surprise to a lot of people because we have batteries all for our lives. but there aren't batteries on the electric grid. the balance between supply and demand that has to be maintained is something met has to be maintained manually by people in grid control centers to work 24 hours a day and maintain the balance on a minute by minute basis throughout the day. the second thing we the -- need to learn is a technology and fail for really long time and still end of becoming something completely ubiquitous to the way we live. i think there are a lot of analogies between a history of the light bulb and history of solar power because i had people

tell me solar cells were invented in the 1940s. people are pushing this as the energy solutions since the 1970s but they are expensive and not widely used so clearly they are fairly ranch we must move on. if you look at the history of the light bulb you can see technology can fail on a technological base is for 80 years and they can fail on a business basis for 40 and still end of becoming something that we are completely dependent upon today. we need to learn big changes that sweet the nation are not things that happen individual by individual. we don't have an electric grid system today because individual people decided to read their house up for electricity. is more complicated than that. it was something that involved private investment, public investment and how all those things that allow people to make individual choices and that really affects the way if we

have to think about the future of electricity today. all of these things i have been telling you about is how the great works and what its flaws are and where it came from. these are things that experts in energy already know but they are not necessarily things that the general public knows or even from people who have to make decisions about the electric infrastructure. that is a big deal. i set up to write this book partly because of nepotism. my husband is an energy efficiency analysts saw what he does is figure out how to make buildings as energy efficient as possible for the least amount of money and after he got this job he started coming, and talking about the stuff he was learning and trying to explain to his client and kept talking about how there were these things that were completely basic information to him to the point that he didn't think they were worth talking about that his clients had no idea about and it affected the decisions that they

may and affected mistakes that they made and i really wanted to try to bridge that gap between the bubble of expertise and everybody else. that bubble of expertise is something it is easy to get into and i know that because i have made the same mistake. i have a background in journalism and i wrote mostly for print magazines and to my started riding for blank blank in 2009 and didn't realize i got myself into a bubble until i started writing for them. this is because you don't get a lot of feedback as a journalist in print magazines or newspapers. you might get an e-mail from somebody that usually a crazy person who writes in all caps and is really angry at you. this was the first time that i actually had conversations with readers in the comments section and started to actually see real-time responses to what i rose and questions and what

things people didn't understand. i got out of this bubble i had trapped myself in and started to learn about how to better communicate science to people and what i was going wrong as a science communicator. one thing that i learned was there were words i didn't realize were jargon that were actually jargon. reading the comments i realized most of my readers, educated people who are excited about science didn't know what peer review meant. about half of my readership seemed to think it meant a paper had been deemed to be completely correct and should not be questioned. half of them thought was a good old boy system that favored people's friends and kept out new ideas. very few seemed to realize there was a complicated process that was all about editing each other's work and figuring out ways to say this might not be correct information but we have said that you are probably doing science correctly. you are not making mistakes in

your methodology. you are not making ridiculous because of logic. even though we don't know whether you are right or not. that is a hard thing to explain to people. it is a hard thing to remember to explain to people and we don't do a good enough job as science communicator's of remembering that there are things we know that other people don't know. we have to get outside of our bubbles and the internet does an amazing job of forcing me to do that and forcing other writers to do that as well. i think the internet does an amazing job of communicating science. one of the things i learned a last summer when i was preparing to do a presentation at a convention of science museums was statistics about how americans understanding of science have changed over the last 30 years. there is a guy at northwestern named john miller whose specialty is studying public

understanding of science and sociology and he has been doing this 30 or 40 years and in 1988 he found 10% of americans understood science well enough to understand what they were reading in the new york times science section. he did the same survey in 2008 and the number had gone up to 28% of americans could now understand the new york times science section. there a possibility that has to do with the new york times science section getting dumber. but i would like to think it has to do with how we communicate science is changing. 30 years ago the only place to read about a new paper was in a newspaper which has a specific tone to the way they write. very specific audience they are reaching out to. today you can go on line and find so many different ways people are talking about that same paper. they might be doing it seriously or as a joke or a video or interactive discussion at each of those is a way for people to

get interested in science who might not have fought out that science to begin with if it were just in a newspaper. allows you to bring in new audiences and allows you to reach out to people in their own cultural language to talk about stuff that was only one niche 30 years ago and that has helped immensely. i am incredibly proud to work on the internet as a science journalist and it makes my science writing better and it really was an incredible part of making me able to write this book. that is what i wanted to talk about today. i am happy to take questions or talk about anything from communicating science to the book itself. >> okay. thank you very much, maggie. let's give her a hand. [applause] >> for the q&a we have a microphone here and we will pass it around.

wait until you get the microphone before you ask your question. >> hello, maggie. i just want to know do you have any idea about how to combat the anti science campaign that is going on right now? >> i do. this is something i ran into in the course of writing this book was an incredible story that made me think about communicating these controversial topics in a way i never thought about doing before. there is a nonprofit -- in kansas that started doing these focus groups in 2008 talking to people in wichita and kansas city about what you thought about climate and energy and kept running into this thing where they would have some guy who thought climate change was a socialist plot but when you came around and asked what he thought about energy >> his light bulbs and owned a prius and was excited about wind

power. that was because he had other reasons to care about energy than just climate change. their rig different ways to get to the same conclusions. one of the things that i think would be really helpful in this discussion is trying to break down those walls of i am on this side and you are on that side and we can't talk to each other. i think there's a lot of opportunity for me to say i have seen the evidence that shows me climate change is actually happening. i won't tell you that it is not but i know you have a reasons to care about energy. let's have a conversation about energy and let's talk about what compromises we can come to together. and we need to do more and one thing that disappointed me about environmental writing online is it tends to be very preaching to the choir and we need to do a better job talking to more people about this stuff and

going out to communities and individuals who might not be drawn in by the same message i am drawn in by. that is something i talk about in the book which is a good way to get around the anti science message by circumventing it entirely. >> thanks for explaining how long it takes. you have convinced me solar power and wind power is fine but will take longer. let me ask you a practical question. my family homes a beach cottage in a beach town and these guys have approach that town and said we will put energy captures a mile offshore that no one will see and we will take that energy into a wire into your town and it is electricity but this requires a wire to be brought from the wave generating machine to the town which is going to go

under somebody's house or neighborhood and it seems so incredibly horrifying that the whole idea is getting off the ground. the capacity of energy to get generated turned into actual energy getting into houses? >> it is really interesting. before i actually wrote this book i did some research on not in my backyard idea. and whether there was anybody thinking about ways to get around that. i ended up running into some interesting research in europe. they have a lot of solar and wind development and what the way they figured out ways to get around this problem. for a lot of it ends up coming down to having communities participating in these projects rather than just having the project happen to them. in denmark if you build a wind

farm you have to offer the community or the person whose property were building on a 20% stake in that wind farm and fish suddenly it disappears. that is a really great idea. i don't have any idea what it would take to get that implemented in the u.s. because it is different from how we traditionally thought about infrastructure development. the idea of interactive participatory infrastructure developments is different and you run into a lot of institutional inertia like we have never done things that way. thus we don't want to because change is scary. it is new be --nimbyism on the part of industry. it will take us thinking about how we do things in a different way. >> hi. other than the horrible

inefficiency, can you talk about what is wrong with the grid and what we might do about it? >> absolutely. one of the thing that is wrong with the grid is the fact that we have to manually balance supply and demand minute by minute. if we had storage or some of the technologies that make up what people talk about when they talk about smart rids we could do a better job keeping the stuff we are completely dependent upon every minute of our lives more reliable because right now we are at risk of a lot of different things that can cause great failures. texas learned this last winter. they had cold snaps that were not anticipated. they had demand for electricity rising but were not expecting it to rise that much and the cold freezing pipes at coal-fired power plants so they had supplied dropping off when the demand was rising and you get black outs.

that is something you could circumvent and you could have a better chance of getting around if there were storage on the grid. it is not just about how we make the world's eighth for wind and solar and build utopia but how we actually prepare ourselves for the twenty-first century. we have a lot of this technology that hasn't changed since the 1970s. i can't think of anything else i dependent on that much that is using 1970s technology. that is one of the biggest things, making this grid more stable. something that has less inherent fiddling around behind-the-scenes that has to happen to actually get it to work. is not as stable as it looks right now and we could do a better job of that. >> smart grid. >> yes. it is a lot of different things. one of the things people are

talking about when they talk about smart grids is demand response. right now these guys that control supply and demand. and that is by these customers called demand response customers. organizations that use a lot of technology like a factory and are paid a premium to be on call so that the grid controls can, in the middle of the day and say we have too much demand and not enough supply. you need to shut off your power for a little bit and they can dial back the amount they are using were shut off and so they don't have blackouts. one of the things we are talking about is expanding that market to smaller business and making it something we can participate in. usually using smart appliances to communicate with grid controllers or sins changes on the electric grid and respond to

those. usually stuff you don't have to have drawing electricity to get the benefit from so your air conditioner doesn't have to be on to keep your house cool and then back on again. same thing with your refrigerator. there have been some good studies in the pacific northwest in the national laboratory. and test cases and cities and when you set this up right, and give people the option of being able to opt in and out of it when they want and have a control panel in their house and say i want to be on demand response today but not tomorrow when you do that not only do they not notice there appliances a going on and off but they never opt out. they don't necessarily do it but giving people the ability is important because you again have the issue of having to have

participatory interaction with infrastructure rather than just having infrastructure happen to you. that is one of the big things smart grid refers to. there are a host of different technologies some of which affect consumers and others that you would never know have changed but it is more than one thing and that is part of the confusion. >> smart grid is part of that? >> absolutely. is often part of making sure if you want to produce electricity and be an electricity producers that is about helping you be able to work with the grid in a reasonable way. if you are and electricity producer and have a solar panel on your roof and putting electricity in the grid the grid controllers can see you. you are a blind spot. they know their electricity on the grid but don't know where is coming from and they don't have the ability to cut it off if we have too much on the grid. that is one of the big things smart meters enable them to do is have you be a good citizen of

the grid rather than a squatter on the grid. >> is there any feeling electric cars might take are enough to affect the amount of electricity we need to produce in a faster way than they can build or build network? >> i don't know that that is going to happen. in fact, there is actually a electric cars could be have potential to be a source of storage on the electric grid and one of the problems with that idea people don't think they're going to get rolled out fast enough to supply that storage that we want fast enough. the problem is it takes a long time for the u.s. electric vehicle fleet to turn over. people are on the order of 40 years. we have had tons of priuses sold but it is only a drop in the bucket compared to the number of cars out there and i think that

we are more likely to not have that happen so quickly that it threatens the grid. if anything it would get more of this stuff and used them as storage and that will help the grid. thank you guys for coming. i really appreciate it. [applause] >> for more information visit the author's website, maggiekb.com. sunday live on booktv visit in depth with economist julianne a malvea malveaux, take your phone calls, e-mails and tweets beginning at noon eastern and on after words. >> i try to look at this in the larger perspective and go back and see how did we get to where we